The first weekend of October brought with it a storm so violent that Castellan's Bakery closed its doors completely. John called the phone mounted on the wall of the house that Sally still didn't think of as wholly hers to let her know. She barely had enough time to thank him before a bolt of lightning struck the sea and thunder immediately clapped overhead so loudly that the whole house shuddered and the phone connection broke off, leaving nothing but static on the line. Sally sighed and grabbed a blanket and a cup of tea, curling up in the window seat to watch the sheets of rain crash down to earth.
And to keep an eye out for the man who surfed in the storms. Sally had seen him out there at least two dozen times by now, but still could barely make out anything more than graceful tanned limbs and long dark hair and a total disregard for basic safety.
So she settled in with her blanket and her mug, leaning her head against the glass windowpane while the house shuddered and shook with each crack of lightning that flashed overhead. Kai had been by the house earlier that week with an armful of firewood, which Sally had found a little silly— after all, she was from New York City, where people didn't do things like light fires indoors, and besides, she'd quite gotten used to the early-morning chill— but now she was eyeing with serious consideration.
It didn't take long before her attention snapped back to the white-capped waves, which stretched tall at high tide, easily ten or fifteen feet at each swell. And in between them, like he'd materialized straight from the mist and the rain— which obviously wasn't possible, Sally must have just missed him launching from a nearby dock or paddling out into the surf— there he was. She watched him move through the waves— like dancing, braiding his body between strikes of electricity, skimming his fingertips along the water like a casual hello. It was mesmerizing. He was mesmerizing.
The cool glass of the windowpane and the warmth of her blanket and the rhythm of the rain was oddly soothing, and Sally barely noticed as she drifted off to sleep. And she dreamed.
She was running— from what, she wasn't sure, but something was after her, or perhaps in front of her, and all that mattered was that she catch up. And she had power— in her left hand, a broken pair of purple glasses frames, and in her right, a dagger whose surface shone like a bronze mirror. And there was a dog by her side, enormous, bigger even than a great Dane, jet-black and smelling faintly of sulfur. And something was wrong, something needed to be fought for, but what? A bright bolt of light, so bright that dream-Sally had to avert her eyes, flashed directly in front of her, and she startled awake.
Her first thought when she awoke was that she used to have a pair of purple glasses, though she couldn't remember ever having had a problem with her eyesight.
Her second thought was that the storm was much more intense than it had been all morning— the house was shaking, the waves were all over ten feet, and it was so dark in between flashes of lightning that she couldn't tell what time of day it was, or if it was even still day at all.
She peered through the window again, and yes— the surfer was still out there, much closer to the shore than she'd ever seen him. His dark hair fell over his shoulders, slicked to his muscled frame by the water. His shoulders heaved, his breath was labored— Sally could see that much even from her window. And his face— his face ravaged by the storm, weathered in the sun and the salt— was the most beautiful thing Sally had ever laid her eyes on. There was a wildness to it, to him, something dark and uncontained and somehow open in the planes of his face.
Lightning struck again.
Sally watched, eyes wide, as the surfer tumbled from his board. His head collided with the seawall and he fell— not into the water, but onto the muddy ground on the other side of the wall. And there he lay, barely fifty yards from Sally's window, slumped and streaked with dirt. Unmoving.
Sally inhaled sharply. Almost without thinking, she dropped her blanket, threw on her mother's old rain boots, and ran— out through the door, into the cold rain which still pelted the ground in thick sheets, soaking straight through the pajama pants she'd never changed out of that day. The tall sea grass bent in the wind and whipped to and fro, slicing at Sally's arms and legs, but she didn't stop.
When she reached his prone figure, she knelt at his side, turning him over onto his back— yes, he was still breathing. She scrambled for any knowledge she'd ever had of first aid— all of the obsessive research she'd done when her parents had died, the lifeguarding class she'd taken at fifteen— and when none of it came to mind she threw caution to the wind and went on instinct alone, blindly pumping at his chest with her hands and lifting his head so that just in case he started breathing again he wouldn't choke. Sally didn't know how long she sat by his side, she just knew— she wasn't going to leave him. Not like this.
It might have been minutes, it might have been hours— but finally, he choked and turned his head to the side, seawater and rainwater dribbling past his lips. He turned his head and looked at Sally with sea-green eyes and blinked. "You."
Never mind that they'd never met. Never mind that being out here in the first place was insane. As the wind picked up and lightning slammed into the ground, splitting trees and sending branches flying, Sally slid the man's arm over her own shoulders.
"We have to go," she said, her voice surprisingly steady. "Come on. I'm not leaving you out here."
She half-carried, half-dragged him to the door that she'd left open, still swinging back and forth in the wind. She slipped on the puddle that had formed where rain had washed straight in, dropped the man on the floor next to the fireplace, and heaved her weight into the door until it slammed shut against the wind and shut out the noise of the world outside. Her hands shook as she broke one match and then another, so she took a deep breath and tried a third. This one caught, and she fed it pieces of newspaper and twigs until the flame was large enough to catch the logs that Kai had brought by.
In a daze, Sally laid a towel down on her living room floor, kicking one of Luke's little toy soldiers out of the way. She maneuvered the man on her floor onto the towel, then grabbed a quilt and laid it over him. She examined his head wound— in the warm light of the cottage, it looked even worse than it had out on the beach. She grabbed a rag from the kitchen, wet it with water from the kettle, and gently— or as gently as she could with trembling hands— began to clean it out. When she was done, it still looked nasty, but the gash wasn't nearly as large as she'd thought. She glanced down at her own arms and legs, realizing that she was coated in mud too, and that perhaps it wasn't just her hands that were shaking. And once Sally realized that, it was like her whole body knew it was cold, and her whole body was wracked with violent shivers.
So she hauled herself into the shower, turned the heat as far up as it would go just to rinse the mud and the grime and the salt from her skin, and changed into one of her mother's old sweaters. She perched in the window seat again, but this time with her back to the sea. Her hair dried in ringlets over her shoulders in the warmth of the fire. Her hands stopped shaking. The raging storm outside died down, the waves losing their white caps.
And through it all, the man on her floor continued to sleep.
Aaand, action. Sorry this took so long to update— I needed to recalibrate a chunk of the story after reading Wrath of the Triple Goddess, and that meant putting this chapter on hold while I reworked my outline. As always, if you liked it, please feel free to leave a review— it genuinely means the world to me when I get to hear your feedback. ~GT